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I. Introduction:

This evening I will examine how biblical maps are created and how they affect our lives. Our journey takes us across a number of disciplines and into spaces ranging from antiquity to cyberspace. I will use visual images as illustrations and guides. They are necessary because it is difficult to speak or write about space. Narrative media go against the spatial grain. Something is lost when space is translated into words or texts.

That in fact is the point of my presentation. Since the nineteenth century, we have ignored spatiality in favor history and historical methods. As a result we explain events and persons by tracing their history, assigning them a place along some path leading from A to B. And we tend to believe that by exposing cause and effect, we understand the circumstances before us. History does not fully explain our lives, and those who suppose that it does may be hiding something. They may be suppressing or overlooking those who don't fit into their history. They may be marginalizing large segments of humanity, denying them their legitimate space, and repressing information that would help us learn about and live a better world.

My thesis is rather simple. I am suggesting that

$ maps, as representations of space, are governed by rules that allow map makers, cartographers, to control or influence the way a map is read.

$ recent studies on critical spatiality in fields such as geography, cartography, philosophy, and religion are expanding our understanding of social space and spatial practice.

$ "accurate" or informed readings of maps require knowledge of "social theory" that sometimes challenges assumptions of "scientific accuracy."

But there are no maps in the Bible! That is another problem. In spite of this absence, there are thousands of biblical maps, or more exactly, thousands of maps that purport to be based on the Bible. This means that every biblical map comes from outside the Bible and is based on someone's reading of a text rather than a drawing. And yet, these maps' importance for both ancient history and modern life can hardly be over-exaggerated. Wars are fought, lives are lost, property is confiscated, families disrupted, and futures destroyed by the way that ancient space in the part of world I am calling Southwestern Asia is perceived and mapped.

(SWA is a designation that I prefer instead of commonly used but highly Eurocentric regional terminology such as "Middle East," "Near East," and a host of other labels that represent attempts at neutrality but in fact perpetuate a problem more than they solve it.)

II. Map Making:

Before turning to the Bible, I want to make a few comments about maps in general and several types of space that occupy our lives.

This diagram illustrates how some people think maps are made. The map maker, the cartographer, perceives "reality" and selects data for mapping. Note that "reality" is in inverted commas. What is perceived can be problematic. We will return to this point.

The cartographer produces a map based on the data that has been extracted. And users interpret the map.

Although this seems like a fairly straight forward process, it is not so simple. No map is neutral. In the first place maps like other texts disguise social contexts and impose their own hegemonies of power and privilege. Map making is governed by its own rules.

The first is the "rule of ethnocentricity," the tendency of societies to put themselves at the center of maps. The second is the "rule of social order," the tendency of cartographers to use verbal text on maps as commentary in order to convey information and impressions about social and political factors beyond the physical and human landscape (Harley 1989: 6). And we may add a third rule of a different order. Maps reflect the social worlds of both the peoples' being mapped and the cartographer, sometimes more the latter than the former.

This C.I.A. map of Jerusalem from 1984 illustrates the rules. Jerusalem is in the center, and a number of comments along with the rose-colored boarder explain the expanse of Israeli occupation. The image represents Jerusalem as it appeared to and served the needs of the cartographer.

The practices are old as these images illustrate.

III. Kinds of Space:

There is a second and, for our discussions, a more serious issue with mapping.

Image 7: How maps are made (repeat)

It is that reality issue again. What reality is being mapped? What kind of space appears on a map? To illustrate the problem, we need look only a few miles away to Detroit where Mrs. Rosa Parks, a recent recepient of a Presidential Medal of Honor, now lives.

Mrs. Parks' simple gesture of refusing to relinquish her seat to a white male in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955 ignited the American Civil Rights Movement. Her's was an action against long-term discriminatory practices that occluded her and all other black people from a particular space. It was a catalyst for racial change in the U.S.

Please note the different kind of spaces involved. The front of the bus was of course physically the front of a bus. It was a material space (Firstspace below). And the bus had been designed in such a way that the front was probably preferred over the rear because of comfort, ability to see, ease of access, etc. It was a designed space (Secondspace).

But these were not the spaces that gave the front seats their meaning and significance. Culture, U.S. history, slavery, racial discrimination, and the bus's being in a southern city meant that Mrs. Park and all African-Americans were by practice and policy marginalized, excluded, and denied access to that space. Her rights and dignity, indeed her entire life, were spatially circumscribed and controlled in such a way that we cannot understand the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. culture, or the trauma in our society if we ignore space and its meaning on that bus. That space was lived space, what we will identify as Thirdspace.

Yes, history was an issue, and so was society. But it was space and contesting space with a spatial practice that changed the course of life in America's southlands. Segregated praxis was overwhelmed by integrating action. It was spatial actions not just words that began the transformations known as the Civil Rights Movement. The same must be said for the strikes, marches, and sit-ins that followed in those painful years.

This is clear evidence of several very important points for understanding space that carry over to biblical mapping.

$ Spatiality is constructed through social practice; Mrs. Park's actions changed the meaning of space on and beyond that bus.

$ there is more than one kind of space at work in peoples' lives; her lived space had been denied; she asserted it by physically moving to a prohibited material and conceptual space; and

$ physical, material space is often not the most important; it wasn't the front of the bus per se that was at stake.

Let me ask a question that the scene raises. If a historian, journalist, or anyone with power who was born, raised, and living in that time and place had been asked before this event to portray their society, would such a scene have entered the record? The answer must be "most probably not!" The persons compiling the record would undoubtedly have been the same as those deciding where Mrs. Parks could not sit. They would appeal to history and society as reasons for maintaining the status quo. The interplay of the material and social designer's space would continue unchallenged and unscathed. We would be told the reasons why whites sit in the front and blacks in the back. Power, knowledge, and space would remain intact.

IV. Critical Spatiality:

The three dimensions of space, call them three kinds of space, that we see in Mrs. Park's case have been studied in detail in recent years. Several of the most influential studies have been written by Edward W. Soja, a geographer and urban design specialist at UCLA.

Although he does not refer to Mrs. Parks as an example, Soja emphasizes the importance of distinquishing various spatialities, and he stresses lived space as a neglected space. For him this is Thirdspace. His description deserves our attention.

Thirdspaces are filled with politics and ideology. They are the dominated spaces, the spaces of peripheries, spaces of struggle, liberation, and emancipation. They are the spaces that are lived, the spaces that are ignored. Mrs. Park's lived space was being denied her.

Soja illustrates this in what he calls two "trialectics." We need not delay on these, but they are useful for understanding how he believes neglecting space, spatial practices, spatial experiences distorts history and society.

It is not surprising, therefore, that he draws heavily on the experiences of minorities, the marginalized, and women when making his case for what he calls critical spatiality. He insists that Thirdspace is socially constructed through social practice. That is, space is not an empty container, as Kant may have thought. Rather things people do create space.

V. Outerspace and Cyberspace:

From the beginning, I have been insisting with Soja and others, that space is socially constructed and the way we experience space affects the way we see space. There are a lot of studies that make this case, arguing that space is a subtext or presupposition that we bring to our view of the world. I will not examine those studies this evening, but I want to draw upon them anyway.

What is our experience of space today? Allow me to suggest two powerful experiences and to present several illustrations.

This image of the "Spaceship Planet Earth" may seem a long way from a biblical map or a biblical experience. I content, however, that it is today's Mappa Mundi -- according to the theme of this colloquium and series -- the modern "map of the world."

Today, Southwestern Asia is captured in photos and landstat imagery every few days if not every few hours by NASA, the French SPOT program, and other intelligence gathering agencies throughout the world. There is hardly a rock or a riverlet, a house or a hut that is not recorded and re-recorded, studied and reviewed in the intelligence bureaus of centralized governments. We may contrast this with the claims of biblical maps that position and define peoples and territories and with scholars, politicians, and militia who then struggle over a few kilometers or hectares.

While these images presumably offer increasingly "accurate" records of the region, they are not without their problems. We have already noted that they record only Firstspace. I will return to the difficulties later, but here, please observe the absence of boundaries and peoples on the seemingly seamless landscape that was home to the Bible. Divisions and boundaries come from somewhere else. They and peoples experiences of them are not etched on the face of the earth.

Important as these images are, for most of us, our first-hand "global" experience does not comes from space travel. Not many of us will be astronauts. And it doesn't come from world

travels that only allow us to visit one region of the world at a time.

For us the analogous "moon-experience" is the internet and world-wide web that lets us travel and communicate instantaneously with every region of the globe, simultaneously if we wish. The technology of cyberspace like the space program is changing our perception of space. It creates globalized spatialities and transforms our lived space. (I wonder in fact if we would even use the term, "globalization" without this spaceship image). And software exists that can "map" electronic traffic and visualize patterns of use by country, company, or comrade.

Before leaving this discussion, I want to point out a second problem. I am arguing that human perceptions of space have changed dramatically in the last quarter of our century because of the emergence of computer-based technologies that support the space program, and the world-wide web. But inspite of the "universalizing" and "globalizing" aspects of life made possible by these technologies, they have not equalized access to resources. In fact, they may be increasing the disparities.

This arc map of the same traffic seen in the global image a few minutes ago portrays the extend of the inequity. Viewed on a variable vertical axis, the image demonstrates visually and vividly that anyone interested in society cannot ignore spatiality.

The biases of the map must be remembered. The map depicts traffic in 1993 not today when the patterns are surely different (compare: http://www.mids.org/mmq/204/.htmldir/af.i.gr.c.html).

Second, because arcs in the illustration emanate only from capital cities, the map reifies internal national uniformity and does not report uneven distributions that exist within those boundaries. And we cannot know the kind of source generating the internet traffic. It could be entirely from government offices or the headquarters of international conglomerates and therefore not be truly representative of citizens' access to internet resources.

At the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, the map clearly exposes absences that existed in 1993. The outlines of national boundaries, for example in Central America, Africa, and portions of Eurasia, are stark illustrations of continuing disparities in resources. In fact, they implicitly demonstrate not only their own failing, but also the failure of nation-states and their efforts to distribute resources adequately in a global environment. Like its predecessors, internet technology and its transformed spatiality do not innately avoid or overcome the hegemony and relationship among power, knowledge, and space that excludes some and includes others.

This review of modern technology reaffirms a few things about mapping spatiality. First, spatiality changes in conjunction with changes in human experience.

Second, shifts in technology cause changes in human experiences and spatiality, as the existence of the cyberdiocese, Partenia, witnesses. And third, the way we map reality depends on the perspectives and technologies available.

VI. Mapping the Bible:

Finally, we may turn to a brief review of the way that Southwestern Asia, including the biblical lands, have been mapped. The illustrations must be highly selective, but they do show the biases that are passed down under the label of reality.

Cartographer's spatial perspective is evident from the beginning of map making. This 9th century B.C.E. map of Babylon now in the British Museum exhibits two rules that we mentioned earlier: the "rule of ethnocentricity," the tendency of societies to put themselves at the center of maps, and by the "rule of social order," the tendency of cartographers to use verbal text on maps as commentary (Harley 1989: 6). In the case of the Babylon map, Babylon is at the center, and texts explain the portions.

Moving forward 1500 years, we note many of the same characteristics on the famous Madeba Map found in a church in the small town of the same name south of Amman, Jordan. The religious perspectives of the cartographer are obvious in the prominence of the Dead Sea with the City of Jerusalem on the west (lower) side.

Among the early attempts to develop projections of a spherical earth are the rota terrarum or orbis terrae that depict three continents. The earliest extant example of what came to be known as T-O (terra-oceanus) mapping is Isidore of Seville's seventh century diagram (Stevens 1980: 272). The dual processes of ethnocentricity and social ordering continued as T-O maps proliferated. In these Christian attempts to organize and theologize space, Jerusalem stands at the center.

It is interesting how controlling this image has become, especially in association the stories of Noah's family, including both the Table of Nations in Genesis 49, and the reuse of Genesis in the second century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees. In this drawing by a twenthieth century scholar, the template is used anachronistically to depict the Jubilees text. The author suggests, in fact, that a drawing such as this might have been lost from the original text. Such attempts to interpret these maps literally by the positioning of the families of Noah's three sons so that each is allotted a distinct portion not only imposes later historical criticism on ancient spatiality, it also confuses several types of space that we are trying to disentangle. The best way to describe such efforts is as mistaken.

The mappae mundi such as the famous World Map of Richard of Haldingham in Hereford cathedral is something of a zenith in cosmographical-theological territoriality. There the rules of ethnocentricity and social ordering overwhelm the viewer, demonstrating convincingly the almighty power and presence of the Christian deity. All the known earth is within divine grasp and control.

Ptolemy of Alexandria (2nd c. A.D.) is credited with shifting humans' gaze from the heavens more directly toward the earth and attempting to understand and plot physical geographical space in an organized mathematical way. He was the first to attempt to impose a grid-like organization on the globe. But his ideas were lost for more than a millennium while they were brought to light in fifteenth century Florence. From then onward, accompanied by advances in exploration, mapping became increasingly scientific and presumably accurate, leading this specialty in the direction of scientific accuracy along with the rest of cartography.

It is this quest to make maps scientifically accurate that causes problems today. While a worthy goal in itself, the desire presumes an objectivity that current studies question. It is for this reason that many spatial specialists today insist that social theory, that is, understanding of the social perspectives of the societies producing a map, must be entertained in any interpretation.

With this in mind we must return to a matter postponed earlier, i.e., the assumption that newer technologies such a satellite photography, remote sensing, global positioning systems, and the like, can assure greater geographic and cartographic accuracy. Recall if you will the standard maps in most Bibles that show the routes of the patriarchs, Moses, the Conquest, and Israel's boundaries at various points in history. Leaving aside questions about the historicity of characters like Abraham and Moses the popular assumption is that the maps accurately represent real places, personalities, and events from the biblical eras. They imply that the biblical authors saw the world and space this way.

These presuppositions have modern consequences not only for religion but also for politics and nationhood. For example, they stand behind present day claims for the modern State of Israel and the tensions that now confront the peace process in that region.

But are these assumptions valid? Do we know that the biblical authors were making precise territorial claims and intending to plot specific boundaries and routes?

VII. Words of caution:

Although cursory and biased, our summary raises a number of cautionary flags. In the first place, it points out the prominence of religious perspective throughout Western cartography. The tendency to blend spatiality with religious belief, especially biblical, is evident, as is the fact that higher degrees of scientific accuracy in the modern world cannot protect mapping against confusions caused by religious beliefs, especially when these rest upon views of the ancient past. To believe religiously that something occurred in the past does not guarantee the accuracy of a map.

Beyond that, our review shows that maps, space, and power go hand in glove. Like texts, maps portray what the cartographer believes or wants. It is difficult to escape one's own biases and the desire to use the tools at hand to achieve one's own ends. Biblical cartographers share this human failing.

Third, we have insisted repeatedly that increased technology and the "accuracy" it affords does not assure any greater equality or objectivity. Again issues of power and spatiality come into play, but so does the fact that Firstspace, the kind that can be measured by scientific instruments, is only one kind of space, and in many instances not the most important. How does one map Thirdspace? Of if we see Thirdspace mapped, how do we avoid reading it as Firstspace? It is hard to know.

IX. Muslim mapping:

The fact that all borders on map are not boundary lines can be easily demonstrated. Modern states in Southwestern Asia often do not define their boundaries. The reason is not only that the terrain is relative impassible and the region sparsely populated. Rather it has to do with these factors in combination with a third. The social systems of the region are segmentary systems. This is were social theory comes into play

In such a segmented social system, it is not where you are that counts, but who you are, who your kin are, who members of your group are, and who your enemies are. The ability of one unit or branch of a kin group to defend and provide for itself against all others is what counts. This has led some to say that "territoriality" in such societies depends on kinship relationships rather than land. Or again, that in such societies, people move through people not through space. Spatiality and people are organically linked. Therefore, space in a segmented society means something different from space in a centralized society. And biblical societies were mostly segmented societies.

Medieval Islamicist, Ralph W. Bauer's monograph, Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography (1995), exhibits an appreciation for such social theory. Brauer documents a number of maps that do not contain clear boundary markers or lines separating territories. In his view of Muslim geography, Aborder zones@ existed where boundary lines did not. These were areas where the sovereignty of neighboring powers competed and overlapped at the outer reaches of the sovereigns= domains.

His illustrations (Brauer, 1995: 29) show conical lines that overlap to illustrate that power diminishes in proportion to the distance from the power center. On the margins, neighboring powers compete and/or share Acontrol.@ The maps represent the political reality on the ground.

It was demonstrated that in fact medieval Arabo-Islamic geographers, ... if they admitted the existences of political boundaries at all, did not conceive of the margins of adjoining individual states as sharp borderlines....geographers described all such borders in terms implying boundary zones of significant depth surrounding a core area of any given political entity within which its capital was located. Transition zones associated with external frontiers were shown to be occupied by a mixed border population differing in its composition from that of the core areas of these states (Brauer, 1995: 65).

With these data we concluded that, in accordance with Ibn Khaldun's dictum, medieval Muslim states were indeed conceived of a being surrounded on all sides by boundary zones and hence lacked the sharply defined territory that would require border lines. Clearly, one could conclude that such states cannot have been conceived of as territorial states by the people of the time (Brauer, 1995: 67).

I may cite a modern example from personal experience. In the early 1980's after the Camp David accords but before the Sinai had been transferred to Egyptian control, I visited the peninsula. I went with Johnnie's Desert Tours operating out of Eilat. Johnnie was an Israeli who loved the Sinai and greatly admired its bedouin, at least most of them.

Overnight was spent in a bedouin encampment, a simple barbed wire and cain fence surrounding a hectare of the desert floor 40 kilometers from Jebel Musa. The highlight of the evening was the bedouin "owner" arrived on his camel with a sack of flour to play a primitive musical instrument, bake bread, and make tea over an open camp fire. As he crouched stirring the tea and baking the bread, Johnnie became nostalgic.

"Mohammed," he said, "do you know that in a few months the Israelis are going to give the Sinai back, and I won't be able to come here any more?" The bedouin continued to stir in silence. So Johnnie repeated only louder, "The Sinai will be Egypt, and I won't be able to visit here." Still no reaction. Finally, and near shouting, in frustration he yelled, "There will be a boundary and border, and probably a fence and patrols, and they will keep me out." With that the bedouin rose slowly. Standing erect and gazing into the darkness, he brushed one hand against the other as if to wipe the discussion away and said, "I have my camel, my water, and my flour. I go where I want."

Two worlds, two perceptions, two experiences of spatiality. One capturing the bedouin diction, "freedom is lost when the first fence is built." The other worrying about spaces controlled by centralized political, military powers.

The story illustrates the differing views, understandings, and experiences of territorial space. To Johnnie it was limited, bounded, and carved into units. To Mohammed, it was open, accessible, identified only by a people's wanderings. Both were constructed through praxis. Neither, probably, could fully understand or appreciate the other even in this close environment. Their experiences and life paths were too diverse.

X. Consequences of biblical mapping:

Biblical history is not exempt from the same prejudices and problems that we have been describing. It is someone's history. And it is written against someone else. Both testaments are filled with accusations against their enemies. For the most part, the peoples of the Bible are presented favorably, while others appear unfavorably or they are ignored all together. In passages where the tables are turned and the biblical peoples criticized and the enemies praised, critics are quick to explain the shift as the deity's attempt to teach the people a lesson or lead them to reform. It is still their story.

A similar case was made in a recent book by a professor in Scotland entitled, The Invention of Ancient Israel. The Silencing of Palestinian History. Obviously, the book was provocative and perhaps intentionally so. The British press carried a flurry of charges and defenses. Israeli journalists appeared in England to argue against the book's thesis. And the author's wife feared for her husband's life. Salman Rushdie found a solemate, but on the other side.

I cite this publication only as an example of the degree to which people are wedded to a particular history, their history, or at least their history as they understand it. Challenge that history, and you will be accused of attacking their belief and identity.

Perhaps as important is a series of current debates within biblical studies over the origins and nature of early Israel. Where did the first Israelites come from, and when did they first become an indentifiable people?

These arguments, sometimes heated, are carried out in the language of history versus myth.

One group claiming to be holding on to history which accusing the others of abandoning it. The other group charging neofundamentalism against their adversaries and proposing a more theological, rather than historical, reading of texts. The debate is too extensive to be analyzed here, but one way to understand it is by the broad categories adopted by the two sides. As suggested, these come close to, or actually are, history and myth. The first group claiming the Bible is very historical; the other group while admitting some history, they are not afraid to admit that some of the Bible is also myth, i.e., beliefs that sustain a community in its endeavors.

In light of our discussion, I would like to propose an alternative, a different set of categories that may both explain why this debate cannot be resolved as it is now cast and offer a means for resolving, or at least transforming it.

Those who are arguing for strict historicity of biblical claims are consciously or unconsciously presuming that biblical territorial claims are claims made for Firstspace, the material, physical world and its territory in Southwestern Asia. This who have been labelled as favoring theological or mythological intepretations, may in fact be suggesting -- perhaps without knowing it -- that biblical territorial claims are claims for Thirdspace, the lived space that is often denied marginalized and disenfranchised minorities. The Bible is claiming the front of the bus -- in this case the land of Canaan -- as a place denied but wanted.

There is biblical grounds for this interpretation. It is found in the multitude of texts that portray a people longing for their homeland. Peter Machinist has provided a convenient catalogue of these in a recent article on the Jew as Other. He claims that

. . . the biblical story tradition of Israel entering as outsiders to take over Palestine should not be dismissed historically, despite the buffeting it has taken in the wake of recent study of Israelite origins....The pervasiveness of this tradition in the Hebrew Bible, and the multiple historical contexts in which it seems to occur there, suggest a protean adaptability to the problems and crises that ancient Israel had to face. Particularly crucial in this regard, as we may now see, was the sense of marginality and contingency inherent in the tradition ....This explanatory power of our story tradition, it may be added, did not cease with the end of the biblical period. As the Passover Haggadah makes clear, Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land; the desire is only that it should stay there and live an exemplary and prosperous life (Machinist 1994: 54; emphasis added).

Nothing I have said this evening will change the Bible or its use. That is probably fortunate. But I do want to suggest that current studies on spatiality, especially the lived spaces of marginalized peoples, offers another avenue to be explored in trying to find a more just way to distribute land and space. Maps based on biblical assertations read without regard for critical spatiality are not adequate bases for deciding rights. They are highly prejudical even though persuasive. If we want again to have a mappa mundi, a true map of the world, we might investigate postmodern spatiality.